Though you might find this strange when I say this, it is a serious world inside a massive, online game. At least, in my experience it is. You couldn't call it humourless, but there are times, certainly, when you look around and find that everyone has just gotten caught up in Life Two, and needs to take a moment out to chill. The Mass Suicide of Shamans was a pretty large example of this, in which players, in protest of the modifications being made to the shaman class, protested by killing their characters and leaving the bodies strewn through the streets of one of the major cities. The protest suicide involved players creating new shaman characters, often with names like 'AccountDeleted' and 'ShamansNerfed' and, with these characters, they would head into Orgrimmar, climb up to the top of the Skytower, stand in the flames of the lamps, and then hurl themselves off, where they would die at the base. When I heard about this, I drifted past to have a look, mainly to feed what is my ever growing fascination with the culture within the game. There were about a hundred shaman corpses at the bottom of the Skytower when I got there. In addition, there were another fifty along the road in and out of the main gate. There might have been more, I suppose, and I figured there would be, because the night was young, but after watching a few suicides, the spectacle lost interest and I took off.
It is entirely possible that there was about a dozen people sitting round making new shamans and then heading out to virtually suicide them, but still, viewed in any context, it's interesting. At least to me it is. It's interesting because it's a surreal form of protest in a world made up of unreal people and it's utterly serious.
It is also, I imagine, just as pointless as real life protests.
